How many of you have ever gotten a telephone call, and upon answering the call you discover that it was not a friend or family member, or even anyone else that you know, but it was instead a telemarketer who was there to try to sell you something? You could tell them, No thank you, I’m good, but they may still persist to try to convince you that you need what they are selling. In fact, there are many scams that happen over the phone where someone may call you, offering you an incredible deal on something, “all that you need to do is give me your social security number and bank account so we can verify that it is you!” They try to create the desire in you to want something, but the truth is that you don’t actually need it anyway.
But that is truly the design of ads and commercials. The goal of a TV commercial is to try to get you to buy what they are selling. They want you to want their product.
And you know, the devil does something somewhat similar to this. The devil wants you to follow him instead of following Jesus, so what does he do? He tries to entice you to sin through trickery and deception. He tries to persuade you away from the teachings of Christ, by any means that he can, trying to spoil our faith with the teachings of the world.
But we are complete in Jesus. We don’t need anything other than Him.
Colossians 2:6-10 “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him:
Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.
And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power:”
Too many cooks in the kitchen. Have you heard this phrase before? If you have too many people trying to interject their own ingredients into a recipe or meal, it will eventually ruin the entire thing. You start with just plain chocolate chip cookies and then someone else wants to add raisins, someone else wants butterscotch chips, someone else wants almonds, and before long you will be left with a cookie that does not resemble anything like the recipe that you started with.
This has been happening in so called churches for hundreds of years now. What once started with the pure word of God that was left by the apostles of Christ has now been changed and muddied by the philosophy and teachings of the world. Where the Bible teaches that certain things are wrong and sinful, someone came along and decided that they didn’t like this part of the Scriptures, so they changed it slightly, trying to make it say what they want it to say.
But I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise because this was foretold that it would happen in the letter from Paul to Timothy.
1 Timothy 4:1-6 “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;
Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:
For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.
If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.”
People are going to listen to false doctrines because they do not want to follow the teachings of the Bible completely. They only want to do what they want, and skip the rest. Or they replace what they don’t like with the teachings of someone else who tells them what they want to hear, so they can try to convince themselves they are doing God’s will, even though they are not.
You always have to remember that it is the devil who tries to twist and change scripture in an attempt to cause others to stray from the narrow path. He will subtly change, add, or remove things to Scripture, with the appearance that these things are right and correct, but they only are an offramp away from the path that leads to Jesus.
It is the spirit of the devil that tries to change the Word of God into something other than what was originally written. Why are there so many “versions” of the Bible today? Because someone decided that they wanted to change what the Bible said. The last time I checked there was only one book of Matthew. One book of Romans. One book of 1 John. Just one of each, not a thousand different versions of the same book. This desire to change the Scriptures only comes from the devil in his quest to try to drag as many unprepared people with him down to hell.
We have one Lord. One faith. One baptism. One Word of God, in which we have all that we need. We don’t need the teachings and philosophy of the world in our faith, because in Christ we have all that we need. We need nothing else.
In Christ,
Andrew
Teufer Lake King James Bible Church 